By now most people have probably heard about the new EU data privacy law that will come to full effect on May 25th 2018. We have adapted Enfold to make the journey to compliance a little easier for those who deal with European Visitors on their site

First things first: especially if you are European this law was very present during the last weeks and there is a good chance you already know about it. If you don’t: what exactly is the General Data Protection Regulation?

What is the GDPR?

“The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a regulation by which the EU intends to strengthen and unify data protection for all individuals from the European Union (EU). It also addresses the export of personal data outside the EU.

It aims primarily to give control back to EU citizens and residents over their personal data and to simplify the regulatory environment for international business (any company that is gathering, processing or storing the personal data of EU citizens).”

If you ended up on our site chances are good you are running your own website. If you have visitors from the EU on your site the GDPR basically requires you to adhere to European standards regarding the data of your users, otherwise you might get fined.

What do I need to do?

At the very least you need to set up a proper privacy policy on your website (WordPress 4.9.6 added the tools to do that), establish a record of processing activities and make sure that users get control over their data (they should be able to get info on what data you have about them, how you use it and if requested you also need to remove it, if that does not interfere with other lawful duties of yours) We are not going into detail here since there are a ton of fully fledged, well written articles out there that explain in detail which steps to take to be compliant.

What do I not need to do?

There are currently a lot of horror stories out there on how websites must be adapted (like all forms must come with checkboxes, all user IP addresses must be erased, all external services like Google Fonts, Video Embeds and Maps must be removed, all Cookies must be blocked and whatnot).

Non compliance will result in catastrophic fines and will end your business. We should all close our websites right now and be done with it. etc etc

We have talked to lawyers, we have visited information events and we have scoured the web for reliable resources written by people with a background in data protection or law. The gist we got from those sources:

It’s all not as bad as it sounds. Yes there is some work to do. But many of these “required changes” are highly debatable or outright wrong, and even if you don’t get everything right from the beginning: the authorities in each country are tasked to try to inform first and only if they encounter repeated violation of the law impose fines.

The key takeaway from our talks with lawyers

This might probably be the most important takeaway we got from our research. According to our lawyers you can pretty much use every feature as is if one of 2 conditions are met: legitimate interest on your side, or consent given by the visitor.

The problem with legitimate interest is that its one of those things that are not strictly defined by the law, which means its open to interpretation. The question is: when are you allowed to put your interest first and when do you need to step back and ask for permission? A question that got no general answer as we understand it, but needs to be reviewed for each case individually.

Although legitimate interest may be open to interpretation, according to our lawyers it’s usually still the better option compared to user consent. The problem with consent is that it can be revoked at any time which can cause you a lot of extra work.

So if its possible its better to argue that you need a feature for a particular business reason, inform the user on your privacy policy page about it and be done with it, instead of placing consent checkboxes and popups all over the website ;) In some cases this might not be possible, so we have added several new options to the theme that allow you to go either route, depending on what you (and your lawyers) feel is appropriate.

So what did change with Enfold 4.4

Finally we are talking about the theme :D As was discussed above, it is currently hard to tell what is allowed, what is not and what is in a legal grey area. So what we did is: allow you to choose how you want to use certain features, depending on what the legal advisors and authorities in your country tell you :)

External services

The biggest changes we applied are in regard to external services. Since external services receive user IP addresses if you use their services we have implemented ways that this only happens on user interaction.

You can now set up your instagram and facbook widget in a way that they do not send data unless the user interacts with them. Same goes for google maps where you can set up a placeholder image that is displayed until the user requests the actual map. The very same was implemented for vimeo videos and youtube. The cool thing about those features is that its not only helpful with data protection but its also in accordance with our recent efforts to improve page speed and performance scores. And it of course helps a lot with performance if external sources are only loaded on user request.

We have also implemented a font upload feature that allows you to upload google webfonts (or any fonts for that matter) to your webserver. Users have asked for the possibility to use their own custom fonts for some time now and it was a good opportunity to implement that feature ;)

Consent Checkboxes

Enfold now allows you to display checkboxes after any theme generated form, that asks for user acceptance of your privacy policy before sending the form. As mentioned earlier we do not think that this is necessary (legitimate interest vs consent), but it was requested so often, we figured we can at least provide the feature for now until there are definite rulings for sending contact, newsletter or comment forms :)

Shortcodes for your privacy policy

We also added a few shortcodes that allow the user to disable certain features on your website, in case you decide to use them without asking in the first place.

[av_privacy_google_tracking] – allows a user to disable google tracking in his or her browser

[av_privacy_google_webfonts] – allows a user to disable the use of google webfonts in his or her browser

[av_privacy_google_maps] – allows a user to disable the use of google maps in his or her browser

[av_privacy_video_embeds] – allows a user to disable video embeds in his or her browser

[av_privacy_link] – displays a link to the privacy policy page set in your WordPress admin panel

If you do not like the default text or language these shortcodes generate you can use your own text like this: [shortcode]YOUR OWN TEXT[/shortcode]

Cookie consent bar improvements

The cookie consent bar was also heavily improved in 2 ways.

It is now possible to generate any number of call to action buttons

It is now possible to display a information modal window that explains which cookies are used on your site and how they are used. It also explains why some of them can not be disabled via shortcode (of course browser disabling always works) and how to opt out of services like google analytics tracking. You can of course change that default info and set up your own modal information.

And since we are talking about cookies:

One more word about Cookies

You may notice the absence of a feature to generally disable cookies. This is a “requirement” that is also heavily discussed on the internet but since Enfold does not set any cookie that stores any personal information we decided against it. Enfold cookies do one of 3 things:

dismiss the cookie consent bar permanently (permanent cookie)

make sure that the breadcrumb navigation is displayed properly (session cookie)

allow a user to disable certain features like webfonts, analytics, maps or videos (permanent cookies)

As you can see none of those store any user information, so the GDPR does not apply here. We would recommend to mention that you set cookies in your privacy policy and also explain how they are used and how to disable them in the web browser, if the user really really does not want any cookies to be set, but we do not think its necessary to block them as a whole. If you think it is: there are plugins out there that can do the job.

Whats more?

Although we only had very little time since our last major update we were able to also set up a new demo for you. Since this is an update that is caused by a new law, we only considered it fitting to provide a demo for lawyers :D

Last but not least: a disclaimer :/

Disclaimer

We are not lawyers, so don’t take any of this as legal advice!

We wrote down what we have been told by people who are well versed in legal matters but a lot of this is subject to interpretation so make sure to consult with your lawyer if you want to be sure what to do.

Full Changelog

Since the last major update was only a month ago there is not a lot more going on than what has been discussed above. Nevertheless here is the full changelog:

Thanks for making Enfold more GRPD compliant. Perhaps you can deliver a minor update in the next days to have the content for the shortcodes also available in German language.
Improvement: in case of data reduction in GDPR, the name field in a contact / comment form should not be set as recommended field. It should be optional.

We have been told with legitimate interest and a correctly worded privacy policy you may use the maps as is and we will do so. if you think it is necessary you can provide a fallback image in your google map template builder element that the user needs to click in order to load it.

If this option is selected no data is transferred unless the user requests the map

Hey! In your backend at “Privacy and cookies” you need to activate the cookie consent feature. this will enable the notification bar. you can then place a button in this notification bar that allows to open the modal window

Hello, your theme is great, thank you!
Where can I find the old version of Enfold (4.3) because the new version is not compatible with our server (php 5.3). My blog displays a blank page. :(
Thank you very much !

Great Job @Kriesi and Enfold team. We are very pleased with Enfold and have been using it for years.

Thanks for sharing your key takeaways with your lawyers.

Questions:
Does cookie banner prevent cookies from being set until consent is given?

With respect to the shortcodes on the contact forms where the privacy policy link appears with the text, is there an option to have the link open in a new Window? This way the user does not hesitate about losing data they entered. The default link opens in the same window.

regarding cookies: No, its a cookie notification bar only and does not block any cookies. Currently there is no option for opening in a new window but we might add that in the future if requested often.

In most cases it should not cause any troubles with your forms though, most modern browsers store that information anyways and if a user clicks the back button re-fill the form fields

Hi,
There are these shortcodes: google_tracking, google_webfonts, google_maps, video_embeds, privacy_link

and this is good, according to the GDPR the user can block whatever he wants to his liking.

But how do I manually add a new service, such as Pixel Facebook?
I opened a discussion in the forum, and also in the comments on Themeforest, but apparently it does not seem possible?
Thanks for any help or suggestion

Ah, there. Thanks for the hint. I now uploaded a zip file Open_Sans.zip previously downloaded from fonts.google.com. But where can I select this font now and thus prevent the theme from loading Google Fonts at all?

In the General Styling section , Fonts tab, “Font for your body text” section it reads: “Choose between your own uploaded fonts, web safe fonts (faster rendering) and Google webkit fonts (more unqiue).” But there is no section “Uploaded Fonts” or “Local Fonts” in the dropdown where I could select my uploaded Open Sans font. The only Open Sans that I can find there is listed under Google Fonts, and that’s what I want to avoid…

your uploaded font should be at the very top of the list. but since you are not the only one not able to detect it I will probably change that to display at the bottom of the list, which is more natural

Kriesi … just THANK YOU to you and your team!
I love ENFOLD now for years and it is the best WordPress theme EVER EVER EVER. It is so flexible, so versatile, you can change the look so easy, even for non-coder.
Thank you for your ongoing work on this great theme.
Thank you for so many new great features over the time, not just bugfixing.
Thank you for the great support forum.
As long as ENFOLD lives, I will never switch to another theme.
Promised :-)

Thanks for your great work guys! Makes the GDPR compliance efforts much easier for us developers!

A little UI remark: the usual orientation of “toggle switch” checkboxes is OFF when it is on the left (grey) and ON when it is on the right (green). Why are yours reversed? Is that a “opt-in” trick? :-)

haha, not really :D
Since we did not have any css for those toggles I googled for some helpful snippets adn this was one of the best so i used it. Didn’t really think about it, especially since the layerslider ones use the same pattern :D

Okay :-) got it.
Well, here is a link to a standard example: https://www.w3schools.com/howto/howto_css_switch.asp
Please include the correct orientation in the next release. For me, as UI professional, flipping the toggle orientation is the same as placing the “x” button in the bottom left corner of the popup. Thanks!